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Published: April 13th 2006
It was an early morning to catch the 9am ferry to Stuart Island. The guy was right about Bluff, absolutely nothing there at all. The ferry was a half full catamaran which skimmed across the water in just an hour. Stuart Island has 400 residents, plenty of posh holiday homes and a small shop and pub. We got to the hostel to find it shut. While we waited we were subjected to the thoughts of this so called experienced hiker from England. He was about 50 and spent about 10 minutes criticising everything about New Zealand and everything about the people of New Zealand, all this in front of a Kiwi couple.
His annoying habit of having to always be right didn’t stop there. Later on that day there were two people getting ready to go on a 10 day hike. He spent ages telling them that everything they had planned was wrong.
The hostel was basic but nice enough. We spent the remaining time of the first day on some walks of the island. All the houses and people are concentrated around the port. All the walks cover the north of the island while the south is pretty much inaccessible.
Day 2 of Stuart Island and we got on a water taxi to another little island called Ulva. This was meant to be a natural bird sanctuary but all we managed to find were a few weka. These are great birds a bit like a chicken but more curious.
It turns out that most of the birds have migrated for winter; we did get to see a lot of trees though.
We pretty much had the island to ourselves as there was only 2 other people there somewhere.
As we waited for the water taxi the only two other people also turned up and said they had seen a sea lion on the beach. As we had seen loads of these we declined going to find it. It turns out that these stupid tourists had mistaken a 20 foot giant elephant seal for a sea lion. Had we known its real identity we would have definitely gone to see it. Luckily the guy on the boat took us round to the bay and we got to see if from the water.
That evening we went down to the local pub. It had to sections a restaurant where all the tourists were paying a fortune for food and drink and a bar which we were the only tourists. Luckily the people of Stuart Island are a nice bunch and we got out alive.
The next morning we were going to leave apart from Carol Anne decided to take far too long to get ready. We ended up running for the ferry. As we did we could see all the bags being loaded on and the people being shown on. Had we been in the UK we would have been told to go away and come back tomorrow, here on the other hand I’m sure if the boat was heading out to sea it would have come back for us.
Back on the mainland we decided to head straight for Milford Sound as we knew we were going to have a few nice days of weather.
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Geoffrey Head
non-member comment
The Last Paradise?
It's lovely to see you're still enjoying yourself Phil, we were beginning to think you'd been kidnapped. Your description of Bluff sounds like the Gupshill on a busy night - it's still clean, still designer, still deserted. Not how I expected New Zealand to be at all - maybe the background in Lord of the Rings was CGI after all! Apparently the fjords are pretty special but you've been in NZ for ages and still haven't mentioned sheep - have you seen any at all? Tee Hee. Best wishes, Andrea and Geoffrey